Glyph

“Everett is one of the most gifted and versatile of contemporary writers.…His work takes hold of us and won’t let go.”

—Alan Cheuse, NPR.org

“Though funny, the novel also possesses a terrible and still sadness, concerning as it does not only William Styron and Nat Turner but also aging and death, the tragic hatred of racists, the depth of solitude at life’s end.…The book, though it’s frequently philosophical, is not in the least boring. Dear reader, how that impressed me! For there are times when philosophy can be less than action-packed. This is not one of them. Therefore, I heartily commend this book to you.…
Percival Everett
numbers among his very best.”

—Lydia Millet,
Los Angeles Times

“[A] stark, shattering novel.…The splintered stories keep their urgency even as they lose their drift. The note of sadness struck in the dedication swells and echoes through the wreckage of narrative, reaching a pitch of extraordinary anguish. This meta-fiction is deeply moving.”

—
The Wall Street Journal

“A potent and thoughtful exploration of the bonds between fathers and children.”

—
The Washington Post

“Funny, insightful, and unpredictable.…Everett is a master of his trade.”

—
Time Out Chicago

“Everett casts his line, as it were, pretty far, and some of the things he reels in, along with a few red herrings, are weighty indeed: racism, anomie, disillusionment, the meaning (or lack thereof) of one man’s life—the American nightmare, in brief, at the end of the line. The setting, the protagonist and the eccentric and pathetic cast of characters will haunt you long after you close the book. I haven’t read anything like it since Georges Simenon. And, as in Simenon’s Inspector Maigret novels, the prevailing mood is one of existential despair.”

—
The New York Times Book Review

“[Percival Everett] is so original and ingenious that he defies categorization.…
[Assumption]
is a quick, bracing and ultimately enigmatic work about the deception of appearances—anything we take for granted, Mr. Everett means to show us, may turn out to be a lie.”

—
The Wall Street Journal

“[
Assumption
is] made up of three sections, with each one overturning its opening premise and taking us out into deeper waters.…All we can do is hang on and go along for the intellectually stimulating and genre-bending ride, in which bodies and assumptions fall quickly by the wayside.”

—Alan Cheuse, “All Things Considered,” NPR

“You think you know things about Ogden [Walker], and the killers he’s pursuing, but Everett will chip away at every one of your assumptions until, in the very last pages, you’re in an entirely different, much more unsettling story. Imagine sitting down with a Tony Hillerman novel and suddenly finding yourself in a Jim Thompson nightmare, but it’s so compelling that you can’t turn away. That’s the ride Percival Everett takes readers on, and the one disappointment may be that there’s absolutely no chance for a sequel.”

—
USA Network
, “Character Approved”

“Well plotted and utterly unpredictable.…As always, this Everett novel is unsettling. Readers who prefer gift-wrapped endings should stay away. All other readers should enter.”

—
Star Tribune
(Minneapolis)

“
[I Am Not Sidney Poitier]
is a freewheeling coming-of-age of sorts…and one of the funniest, most original stories to be published in years. Everett has written a delicious comedy of miscommunication. From his narrator’s unfortunate, hostility-inducing name to Ted Turner’s constant non sequiturs, confusion reigns in this journey through the perception-warping, soul-twisting badlands of race and class.”

—National Public Radio, “Books We Like”

“With more than twenty books to his name, Percival Everett is not only one of the most prolific modern American writers, but one of the most diverse, tackling just about every genre there is, and freely mixing them. He is also one of our best:
I Am Not Sidney Poitier
is further proof of that.…It’s also funny as hell.”

—
The Believer, The Believer
Book Award

“The wickedly funny Everett prods the reader to question issues of identity, prejudice, race, class and any other core beliefs about the South that might be lying around.…An unforgettable trip to a funhouse where nothing is what it seems.”

—
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“The funniest book I have read all year, if not ever.…There was not a page of this book that didn’t have me smirking my face off and wishing I was a funnier person, even as I recognized the sad realities of racial issues in our country that made this kind of satire possible. Everett is razor sharp throughout, and Mr. Tibbs could have no better tribute.”

—
The Rumpus
, Drew Toal, “The Last Book I Loved”

“One of the most talented contemporary novelists writing in English.…[Everett] is wildly inventive.”

—
Star Tribune
(Minneapolis)

“Everett effortlessly entertains…and refuses to be shy about speaking his mind.”

—
Time Out New York

Percival Everett by Virgil Russell

Assumption

I Am Not Sidney Poitier

The Water Cure

Wounded

American Desert

A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond As Told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid

Damned If I Do

Erasure

Glyph

Frenzy

Watershed

Big Picture

The Body of Martin Aguilera

God’s Country

For Her Dark Skin

Zulus

The Weather and Women Treat Me Fair

Cutting Lisa

Walk Me to the Distance

Suder

The One That Got Away

For my dear friend and editor, Fiona McCrae

A

I will begin with infinity. It was and is the closest thing to me. I am a child and all I see is infinitely beyond my grasp, my understanding, my consciousness. But my unconsiousness is what my father and mother were just sick with anxiety over. They paced and worried aloud to each other about what I might sense in their tone, in their manner, but failed at every turn to attend to the very words they spoke, saying anything they pleased in front of me, wondering aloud to each other whether I had Uncle Toby’s ears—
they’re just so huge
—, commenting on my slow rate of attaining a full pate of hair, and above all else, paining at my seeming inability to adopt language. But while they stewed, I watched and contemplated potential and actual infinities and interestingly I found that there is no space between the two, that the arrow may indeed halve the distance to its target until the cows come home,
¹
but the target and the arrow situated together in my field of vision were therefore in the same place and so the arrow was there and not there, making Zeno both right and wrong. My parents, however, clawing at speech like sick cats, could not fathom my lack of interest in parroting their sounds. They put their smelly mouths in front of my face, somehow assuming that without an ability to express offense, it could not be experienced, and formed words slowly, carefully, allowing me to observe where the tongue is placed for t’s and how the lips peel apart for b’s. They pointed to the table and said the name of that thing, assuming that I would learn not only to say it, but to recognize it. However, I did not see
table.
I saw where the plates were, what occupied the space beside my high chair. Bless their hearts, they were trying to teach me, to show me
tableness
, though I am lost as to why they did not simply say that.
²
But they were what they were, sadly, and that was speakers and for them infinity only moved in one direction and so it was only faith that had them believe that it actually existed. They peered ahead at the horizon and decided that the limit of their vision was merely the limit of their vision, accepting that the edge moved away with each step toward the horizon, assuming that their inability to define or delimit the limit itself did not negate the actuality of that limit. And so they kept looking at something that was not there, but that was also there forever, a kind of double gesture,
la double séance
, if you will, and they called it beautiful. If not insane, then they were at least dangerous.
³